The Secular Student Alliance is seeking a Student Programs Specialist. This position focuses on developing and delivering services and resources to SSA’s individual student members, programs that normalize secular student identity (including Secular Safe Zone and Openly Secular), alumni support, and other programs that focus on secular students as individuals. Unlike most SSA campus organizing positions, this position does not involve working with affiliated campus groups, and instead focuses on support for individual students, including the role of Secular Safe Zone Coordinator.

This position will require substantial exploration of the secular student demographic and related research to understand their needs and identify areas in which we can best provide support for a secular student activist identity. The ability to consolidate information, set metrics, and evaluate program success will be essential to success in this position. The ideal candidate will be self-motivated, able to work efficiently in a busy, rapidly-changing office environment, and have excellent communication skills.

Secular Start Up is the finest (and only) official video advice series from the Secular Student Alliance, put on by our Communications Associate, Kelley Freeman, and our Regional Program Manager, Gordon Maples. It originally started in August of 2013, when neither of them even lived in the same state.

Since Kelley and Gordon are both in the office now, they've switched up the format for their weekly advice series for secular student leaders. Instead of doing it by Google+ Hangouts live every week, they've made their series more dynamic and hopefully more helpful!

This week, Kelley and Gordon are re-covering a topic they talked about in their first few weeks of the series: Tabling. A perenially relevant topic to students, their video on tabling includes where on the website to order tabling supplies, how to set it up, and some of the best practices.

Every week, the SSA prepares a summary of what the secular student movement is doing. To hear this update and news from the secular movement, tune into the SCA's National Secular Movement Update every Thursday at 12PM ET.

This week, the Secular Student Alliance is getting everything prepped and ready for Halloween, when campuses all over the country will be making their own Graveyard of the Gods, a farewell to all the long forgotten deities. It is an opportunity to demonstrate that there are thousands upon thousands of gods out there, and most of them are no longer worshiped. As of 10/23, there are 67 campuses that are planning on participating, 27 of which have requested tabling supplies and event packets. Final numbers will be determined after the fact. We encourage any campus leaders who are participating in this event to contact us for help with a press release for your event and to reach out to your local media!

The Secular Student Alliance Campus Organizing team has begun to do some promotion for Carl Sagan Day, which is 11/9. Past affiliate group events have included visiting their local planetarium, a birthday celebration for Carl Sagan, and even a one-day conference with an off-campus group.

This past weekend, the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Akron in Akron, Ohio hosted their second annual Sexy Secular Conference, a free conference dedicated to sex-positivity and secularism. There were over forty people in attendance, with speakers from as far away as California. The conference organizers consider it a success, and they look forward to putting together an even bigger and better conference next year.

For more information, questions, comments or additions to student-led efforts in the secular movement, contact [email protected].

The Greece v. Galloway Supreme Court decision opened the door for nontheists to step in and deliver secular invocations in their home towns, including students.

In fact, on October 7th, James Bartel, the vice president of the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Central Florida, delivered one of these invocations in his home town of Ocoee, Florida. Not only did he have fellow UCF students supporting him, but there were also students from the Secular Student Alliance at Valencia and members of the off-campus Central Florida Freethought Community as well.

This was the first time that any sort of secular invocation has been done in the Ocoee City Hall! This is a big step to a better future for secular Floridians. When James gave this invocation, he was making sure secular people in his town weren’t excluded from meetings and was helping to strengthen the secular community in the area.